I'd actually think it is fair to consider it one of the biggest flops in MMO history, not being a jerk or trying to spark rage, it's simply true.
Greg Zeschuk- Co founder & VP of Bioware
Ray Mayzuka- Co founder & CEO president of Bioware
Daniel Erickson- SWTOR lead designer & creative director
Stephen Reid- Community Manager on SWTOR
Rich Vogel- SWTOR executive producer
Georg Zoeller- Lead combat deisnger for SWTOR
Alex Freed- Senior storyteller for SWTOR
ALL of the above have abandoned the game, and around 100 staff have been laid off.
With all the rumours of the 300 million dollar budget, the hype, the marketing, all the celebrity voice acting, talk about raising the bar for the MMO genre, the STAR WARS IP, the solid track record of Bioware's single player games... The game announced it would be going free to play barely 8 months after release, and 90% of initial servers at release have now been closed.
All this in under a year, can you name another MMO which has had this much failure in such a small amount of time? I can't.

Originally Posted by Eroginous

This is about as logical and consistent as any argument regarding SWTOR can get.

In your opinion.....if the game is making enough money for EA/BW to continue maintenance and development of the game and 500,000 (ish) players are happy playing the game is it still a failure?!?!?!
It is my opinion that it is not.

In your opinion.....if the game is making enough money for EA/BW to continue maintenance and development of the game and 500,000 (ish) players are happy playing the game is it still a failure?!?!?!
It is my opinion that it is not.

It's not as simple 'there are people playing the game, we are still developing some things, servers haven't been shut down yet, so we must be making money.' We don't know if they are making money because they refuse to release those numbers related to development costs. They will release sub numbers and box sales and one can sort of extrapolate what they've made thus far, but no one has a number associated with cost to compare that too. On top of that, EA can hide the costs of the project amongst 50 other games they publish and make it impossible for anyone to pinpoint the true costs of the game.

To this effect, it's possible that SWTOR isn't making a dime, but is still within a window of opportunity to pay back the investment by changing business models. However, it's also unclear where the money that paid for SWTOR came from. It could have been profit from other games and had no debt attached to it. This is why it's absolutely critical for EA to release that information before we can even begin to say that SWTOR wasn't a failure.

It's immediately clear that SWTOR has been a failure in the MMO market and the changes which EA is making reflect that much. Just how much of a failure or how much of a success it could become in the future, depends entirely on the numbers we aren't being given. I tend to think that there's a level of embarrassment that prevents them from sharing those numbers. Honestly, and I am being perfectly honest here, I do not think that going free to play with a micro transactions system and a sub fee for premium content is a good idea. At this point in time, without a steady income of subs and content sales, they will not have the ability to address the issues the game has which need to be fixed in order to make it more appealing, as those games who DO have the income from a larger subscriber base.

You look at games like World of Warcraft and Rift as leaders in the MMO market for iteration and overall game improvements (I hate comparing games, but you have to in this instance). Wow is where it's at right now because the developers are absolutely committed to improving the game. A lot of people will say things like 'well they've had 8 years to do that' and that's completely besides the point. Every two years Blizzard has rolled out an expansion and then every 6 months a content patch, both of which bring major changes to the game, every time they do it. At any time during SWTOR development, they could have taken a snapshot of the features and systems within Wow and gotten a sense of the impact those changes have had over the course of 8 years. The game itself is hardly recognizable when compared to the original incarnation of the game. The only things which have essentially remained unchanged are the original art and textures which haven't yet been updated (notice I said 'yet').

If you want me to, I'll run down the list of things I would do to improve SWTOR, which would certainly be an immediate improvement.

What I mean by this is that 10mil+ number that keeps getting thrown out there. When over 6million people of that are in China, that means that 60% of it's playerbase is in a market that is unavailable to those other games.

Because Chinese players are worth less than NA/Europe players, right? -_-

Because Chinese players are worth less than NA/Europe players, right? -_-

Chinese players pay with time cards that they only need to refresh every 12 months if I recall correctly (could be 6 if not), so for the same amount of money a westerner pay monthly a Chinese player count as a subscriber for 12 months if he doesn't use up the whole time card, no matter if he's actively playing any more or not.

So yes they are actually worth less when using Blizzards promotion numbers, as individuals we would have to know how many hours on average the Chinese player use up monthly, a number I don't see Blizzard releasing...ever.

In your opinion.....if the game is making enough money for EA/BW to continue maintenance and development of the game and 500,000 (ish) players are happy playing the game is it still a failure?!?!?!
It is my opinion that it is not.

IMO - it is a failure, for the simple reason it failed to meet expectations.

The game is good, it is fun, it has some great ideas.....but it was also highly unpolished, launched incomplete with too little end game, relied far, far too much on players playing alts for content with too little variation to make that fun, had too many flaws and bugs to keep its player base and is hobbled, to a degree, by its own innovations such as voice acting and the conversation system.

SW, right now, is slowly getting into the shape it should have had at launch. Its become more polished. Basic features have been added. Little annoyances and bugs have been ironed out. More end game has been added. The nuimber of servers is more appropriate to the player base. But I don't think its quite there even now.

Unfortunately, the game was pitched to compete with WoW as it was 7 years ago. Had SW launched at that time, it would have been a massive hit I believe. Even with all the flaws. But if people want an MMO today, they are going to compare it with WoW...which is, after 7 years, a highly polished piece of work.

And SW, by comparison, wasn't polished. Too many bells and whistles and not enough emphasis on getting the basic gameplay right. They didn't even get combat right with all the click lag issues where animations interfered with CDs.

It's only failiure was asking for a subscription. Although, that was a pretty big one. I quit before month 1 for this reason, just not enough long term content to justify it other than levelling. It had it's problems and wasn't very original gameplay wise, but when it was good, it was pretty damn good.

IMO - it is a failure, for the simple reason it failed to meet expectations.

Would mean that 80% of all game I've ever played seems to suck. I played Skyrim about ~200h, I liked playing it but I expected to reach the point where the world would cater more for the main story. This way the game doesn't meet my expectations. D3 did not make it, GW2 did not make it and so on...

Expectations are simple persons own imaginations and hypes of things. And only very few games ever reached or overcapped my expectations. Nevertheless many of them are very good and fun to play :/

One gaming companies marketing demographic has absolutely nothing to do with other gaming companies. Blizzard sells their game in China, so can anyone else. Claiming otherwise is to discount the relevance of the gaming population in China and write them off completely. Do they not pay money? Does that money not go to Blizzard and become fund for further development and maintenance?

By this logic, it's completely retarded for any other game company to NOT release their game in China. You don't get to accuse Blizzard of anything because they make a business decision that you're not willing to make, and thus profit from it.

Completely fail argument here. You have ZERO understanding of how WoW works in China.

1) China pays Blizzard for the rights to allow WoW to be played in China. This is funneled thru a company called NetEase. I think it's around $50mil per yer. So NO, not every game or company can sell it's product in China, especially on the open market, of which, I think in China, there is virtually none.

2) gamers there actually do not pay for the game. They don't pay for expansions either. They pay for time cards which are pay by the hour, and costs much less per month than the typical NA/EU user

3) A chinese customer only has to log in once and use an hour or so of game time every 6 months to be counted as a paying customer.

Thus, I think it is very clear that Blizzard can and does "pad" it's numbers with China. Is this wrong or evil of Blizzard to do this? No, not really, it is what it is. China is a good MMO market. The beauty of it for Blizzard is that it is essentially a pure profit market for them. China just pays them the money for the rights to play the game. Blizzard doesn't have to run and pay upkeep on servers, have to deal with server maintenence, pay people to run all of those blade servers etc... Pure profit.

But again, not every company can and does release their game in China. Thus by your words, it would be completely retarded to think they can.

---------- Post added 2012-10-11 at 12:53 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Freese

Because Chinese players are worth less than NA/Europe players, right? -_-

Actually, if you look at the financials and their investor statements. yes they are worth less. About 94% less actually.

Looking at their 3month and year conference call investor statements we see this clearly.

94% of WoW's income comes from the NA/EU market, where only 6% comes from the Asia/Pacific market.
I'm not lying look it up.

Thus more than half of Blizzards gaming population comes from 6% of it's income.
And again, as per my above statement, this is a decent business model for Blizzard because they don't have to do anything. China runs everything and pays Blizzard around $50mil per year to let them play the game. Pretty sweet deal for Blizzard.

I'm still quite worked up about TOR's decision to not include any sandbox elements, meaningful world PvP, or anything and made it into pretty much a generic, less polished wow clone. The only major things that attract my attention are warzone bolster mechanics and huttball.

Again, compared to flops like Tabula Rasa, APB, or even EA's last "flagship" mumorpuger, Warhammer Online... TOR isn't actually doing that bad. BioWare just made a number of boneheaded design decisions which caused serious customer retention issues. The only real "failure" here was EA's unrealistic expectations and BioWare's development mismanagement.

EA wants WoW 2.0 but I doubt that even an actual WoW 2.0 would have anywhere near as much success as the first one did.

---------- Post added 2012-10-11 at 09:16 AM ----------

Originally Posted by hk-51

Dear god. I can't believe this thread is still here. Its like the anti menorah. We hoped it hoped it would burn out after a few days but the derp just keeps burning.

This thread is either subjective measures of "success" or objective measures that can not be supported with concrete evidence.

Why is this still going?

Too many of us are at work, and bored?

Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot.
Who had nearly fought the Dragon of Angnor.
Who had almost stood up to the vicious Chicken of Bristol.
And who had personally wet himself, at the Battle of Badon Hill.